From Grace to Transformation:
A Wesleyan Call to Racial Justice at MFSA

August 2026 | Bridget Cabrera

From Grace to Transformation: A Wesleyan Call to Racial Justice at MFSA

Note: ​In June 2023, the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) Board of Directors established the Racial Audit Implementation Team to carry forward the recommendations from the comprehensive Racial Audit. This work represents our deep commitment to becoming an anti-racist organization. Bridget Cabrera is a member of that team, and this reflection is part of our collective journey to name, confront, and transform the white dominant culture within MFSA. It emerges from ongoing conversations centered on six key themes/patterns of white supremacy identified within our organization. These are the entrenched patterns we are actively working to disrupt as we move toward the liberation and equity we seek.  

We are sharing these reflections and insights publicly with our movement because accountability, transparency, and shared learning are essential to dismantling white supremacy. We know that transformation does not happen in isolation. By sharing our process, struggles, and growth, we hope to invite our broader community into this work with us—offering tools, solidarity, and space for mutual reflection as we continue building a more just and faithful movement. 

Theme 2: MFSA functions as an organization of and for white progressives, prioritizing white power and control, which results in a lack of investment in and abdication of responsibility to be accountable to People of Color communities. 

One of the most important parts of this work has been the conversations happening within MFSA's Racial Audit Implementation Team. These have not always been easy conversations, nor should they be. We have been asked to sit with uncomfortable truths, to listen to experiences that challenge our assumptions, and to examine not only what MFSA hopes and intends to be, but how our structures and practices have done harm. We have had to ask difficult questions about power, accountability, investment, leadership, and what it means to move beyond a commitment to racial justice toward an organization that is in real, mutually-accountable relationships with people of color communities. The following is my attempt to share some of what I have been learning through these conversations, the tensions and questions I continue to carry, and what I believe this moment of truth-telling and transformation is asking of us as an organization.

Telling the Truth: The Work of Justifying Grace

In the Wesleyan tradition, justifying grace is the grace that makes truth-telling possible. It is the grace that reconciles us to God and to one another, not by minimizing what has been done, but by giving us the courage to name it honestly and to believe that naming it is not the end of the story.

MFSA needs that grace right now. Because the truths named by our racial audit are not easy to hold.

Theme 2 of the audit identifies something structural and stubborn: that MFSA has functioned as an organization of and for white progressives, prioritizing white power and control in ways that have resulted in a failure to genuinely invest in, and an abdication of responsibility to be accountable to, people of color communities. This is not simply a description of who has held leadership positions or what our demographics look like. It goes deeper than that. It names the way power has operated, who has shaped our culture, whose voices have been centered, where resources have flowed, and who has been expected to adapt to a dominant culture rather than share in defining it.

What makes this particularly difficult is that it describes an organization that has long understood itself as committed to justice. MFSA was not indifferent to race. We talked about racial justice. We advocated for it. And yet, the audit names the gap between what we professed and how we were actually structured, between the values we articulated and the accountability we failed to practice.

Justifying grace does not allow us to look away from that gap. It asks us to stand in it, to call it what it is, and to let that truth become the ground from which something new can grow.

How the Pattern Shows Up

One of the most important things our team conversations have surfaced is that these patterns rarely announce themselves. They do not usually arrive as deliberate choices to exclude or marginalize. They arrive as habits: as the path of least resistance when time is short, capacity is stretched, and the pressure to act is high. They are the result not of malicious intent, but of a failure of intentionality. And that distinction matters because it means the work of transformation is not primarily about identifying bad actors. It is about interrupting deeply embedded defaults.

Consider what happens when planning happens at the last minute. When we wait too long to organize around a major convening or campaign, we default to what we have always done: the same voices, the same partners, the same approaches. There is no time to collaborate broadly, no space to ask who is missing from the table, no room to do the slower work of building something together. Urgency becomes a reason to replicate the past rather than reimagine it. And because the past was shaped by white dominant culture, defaulting to it is not neutral. It is a choice, even when it does not feel like one.

Or consider what happens in moments of crisis, when a significant issue demands a public response. There can be pressure, sometimes genuine, sometimes ego-driven, to be the first to speak. But being first is not the same as being faithful. It is often better to walk slowly together than to run ahead alone. When we rush to make a statement without consulting the communities most affected, without asking whose voice should lead, we are again centering our own instincts over accountable relationships. We communicate, however unintentionally, that our visibility matters more than their leadership and experience.

And then there is the question of who leads over time. When we have not invested in developing new leaders, when we have not shared power, built pipelines, or created genuine pathways for people of color to shape MFSA's direction, we find ourselves with the same leaders doing the same things, often resistant to new approaches simply because the organization has never built the capacity to hold them. 

These patterns compound. Each instance may seem small. Together, they produce an organizational culture that centers whiteness not by design, but by default, and default is enough to cause harm.

The Long Work: Sanctifying Grace and Structural Change

If justifying grace gives us the courage to tell the truth, sanctifying grace is the grace that transforms us in light of it. In the Wesleyan tradition, sanctification is not a moment but a process, the slow, ongoing work of being made holy, individually and together, through practice and discipline over time.

This is where MFSA now stands. The truth has been named. The question before us is whether we will allow it to do its sanctifying work, or if we will acknowledge it and move on, leaving the underlying patterns intact.

Sanctifying grace, in this context, looks like institutional conversion. It means moving beyond statements of commitment to the actual reordering of how we operate. Concretely, this means:

• Experimenting with new ways of meeting and making decisions, practicing new ways of doing things that center shared accountability and vision. 
• Building relationships with People of Color communities that are mutually accountable, not transactional. Relationships in which MFSA is changed by those it is in relationship with, not simply doing good on their behalf.
• Developing and sustaining leadership that ensures People of Color are not just present but genuinely shaping MFSA's direction, culture, and priorities, and doing that work before the moment of crisis, not in the middle of it.
• Moving our default from one that draws inward and more insular to one that draws wider and more inclusive. 

None of this is quick work. Sanctification never is. But the Wesleyan tradition insists that transformation is real, that communities, like individuals, can be made new through sustained practice and the grace of God working through it.

Only Christ is the Savior

There is a particular temptation for progressives and progressive organizations like MFSA, organizations that have built their identity around prophetic witness and justice work, to believe that we are indispensable. That the movement cannot move without us. That we must always be at the front, always be the first to speak, always be the ones with a hand on the steering wheel.

But we are not the savior. Christ is.

Our work matters deeply. The commitments we carry are real, and the stakes are high. But we are not responsible for saving the church or the movement. We are called to participate faithfully in God's work of transformation, a work that was underway long before MFSA existed and will continue long after any of us have finished our particular part in it.

That means something practically. It means that when we rush ahead without collaboration, we may be substituting our own urgency for genuine discernment. It means that when we hold tightly to control, over messaging, over strategy, over who leads, we may be confusing institutional preservation with faithful witness. It means that the very patterns the audit names, the centering of white leadership and the failure to share power, are not only a justice failure. They are a theological one. They reflect an organization that has trusted its own instincts more than the wisdom of the communities it claims to serve.

Perhaps institutional conversion means learning to trust God enough to share the wheel. To plan early enough that collaboration is possible. To respond to crisis slowly enough that accountability is practiced. To develop leadership broadly enough that the organization is not dependent on the same few people making the same few decisions. To believe that when we loosen our grip, something more faithful, not less, becomes possible.

This is the promise of sanctifying grace: not that we will have less, but that we will become more. 

A Call Forward

The racial audit has made visible truths that MFSA can no longer afford to overlook. Justifying grace has brought us to the moment of truth-telling. Sanctifying grace is now asking something harder of us: not acknowledgment, but transformation. Not incremental adjustment, but the kind of institutional conversion that actually shifts power, rebuilds relationships, and makes genuine accountability possible.

The tensions and questions I carry out of our team conversations are not resolved. I do not think they should be yet. But I believe this: the Wesleyan tradition gives us both the theological language and the spiritual resources to do this work — if we are willing to be changed by it.

MFSA has the opportunity not only to change, but to bear witness:to show what it looks like for a faith-based organization to confront these patterns honestly, to be transformed by grace, and to live more fully into the prophetic mission we have always claimed.

That witness begins with telling the truth.

And by God's grace, it does not end there.